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Le jardin clos, Op 106

Introduction

Fauré had set ten poems from the La chanson d’Ève of Charles Van Lerberghe in 1906. This great cycle seems to be Fauré’s quiet, but mighty, riposte to the overwhelming challenge of Debussy’s music and ethic. These two great composers had Verlaine in common, but between them there had always been a wide divergence of literary, and other, tastes. It is curious, therefore, that they looked to different members of the same group of Belgian writers for the symbolism which was to define the great works of their maturity – Debussy to Maeterlinck for Pelléas et Mélisande, and Fauré to Van Lerberghe for two song cycles, La chanson d’Ève and Le jardin clos (this later cycle, composed in 1914, is in fact based on an earlier work by Van Leberghe from 1898). The two Belgian poets were closely linked in terms of their lives and work, but Maeterlinck led Debussy to his opera, a story full of atmosphere and drama, and Van Lerberghe gave Fauré a kind of pre-Raphaelite language of idealized feminine beauty and grace where the mysterious imagery discourages a story-line. (There is perhaps a narrative of a kind in La chanson d’Ève, none at all in Le jardin clos.) This poetry achieves, thanks to Fauré’s music of course, a cosmic depth of utterance. Without Fauré the poetry of Van Lerberghe, in the harsh light of a less perfumed century, can seem dated and mannered; but it was the catalyst that released in the ageing composer a new and powerful vein of lyricism.

La chanson d’Ève led to the use of a new expressive vocabulary in Fauré’s opera Pénélope, a work which engaged his attentions for many years, and which was first performed in 1913. Le jardin clos, a work written on the threshold of the First World War, is the beneficiary of the refining fire through which the composer passed in the process of working on his opera. Both cycles were written for a woman’s voice; both cycles encompassed a tribute to the mystery of the eternal feminine. This is music written by a man who all his life had been a passionate, yet discreet, lover of women. The distanced eroticism of Le jardin clos seems a leave-taking – still passionate, ever discreet, but a valediction nevertheless.

At this time in his life the composer was suffering from tinnitus and hearing problems: both low and high registers were distorted, only the middle remaining clear. This is often given as a reason for the restricted range of both the vocal line and the piano-writing in the late cycles. It is clear that practical considerations played their part in the evolution of the works, but the phlegmatic style of vocal-writing, sparing in its intervals but melodically memorable and capable of huge emotion, seems a natural evolution from the earlier songs of the third period. In this music there is never a sense of straightened circumstances changing the organic nature of artistic development. The texts for the cycle are taken from Van Lerberghe’s Entrevisions. In this work ‘Le jardin clos’ is a subsection, but in fact only songs vii, iv, ii are to be found in this part of the work. Fauré has allowed himself to choose freely from the remainder of Entrevisions for the other poems contained under the enigmatic sub-headings ‘Jeux et songes’ and ‘Sous le portique’. Needless to say the thematic links between the texts that one might expect in this cycle, a walled garden for instance, are very nebulous.

If the cycle does not achieve the cosmic grandeur of La chanson d’Ève (it is in any case shorter), it is a more perfect work; indeed, it is one of the great masterpieces in all French music. Le jardin clos is still underestimated, a mystery to many, and it remains necessary for enthusiasts to convince the sceptical. Perhaps the tunefulness of his early years led the public to expect something different; one feels that the composer has long been punished for his change of style as a kind of betrayal of his early willingness to please. In some ways Webern’s songs, contemporary with this cycle, have met less resistance in the concert hall. Perhaps it would be easier if we simply admitted that Gabriel Fauré, the inaccurately dubbed ‘Master of Charms’, was an avant-garde composer in his own way.

Recordings

'All the singers involved in this ideally presented and recorded offering perform with a special ardour and commitment and Graham Johnson is, as alway ...'There can be nothing but praise for Johnson's pianism and his selection and arrangement of the songs. Volumes 3 and 4 are eagerly awaited' (The Sunda ...» More

In the sleep of the beloved there is a kind of fulfilment. This music is almost too transparent to exist in reality. The rippling chords beginning and ending in C major take us on a journey both uneventful and packed with incident. The vocal line is undemonstrative, yet almost painfully eloquent. This simplicity could not be more different from the recherché textural and harmonic explorations of Ravel in his contemporary Mallarmé settings (1913). Unlike the music of Satie, whose minimalism sometimes seems childlike, Exaucement has the simplicity of a great sage. As a pianist attempts this accompaniment the harmonies seem to dissolve under the fingers; Fauré’s achievement here is to distil the essence of French song – one might be tempted to say of music itself. In this handful of gentle oscillations one can sense the huge numbers of notes that were eliminated by their composer over many years of renunciation to achieve this almost unworldly limpidity. For those with the ears to hear discipline and self-sacrifice turned into music, something heartbreakingly beautiful is created from thin air. Here we first experience something that runs throughout this marvellous cycle – a state of musical grace that is all the more touching for trying so little to engage the attention of the listener.

Quiet and understated though it is, this is a voluptuous song. In Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis the seeming innocence of the eponymous narrator enhances the erotic effect of the music. Something similar happens here, even if this is far removed from the heady world of the poetry of Pierre Louÿs. In terms of rhythm and pace the song inhabits the same world as J’ai presque peur from La bonne chanson. Fear is the key word, or perhaps trepidation. There is a pulsation here which also recalls another Verlaine song, Green, with its palpitating accompaniment, a song that similarly describes sexual devotion within a halo of self-doubt and diffidence – ‘Am I beautiful enough, desirable enough, good enough to be the chosen one?’ The possibility of rejection and abandonment is implicit in such wholehearted commitment to another, and sets the heart, and music, a-quiver. Needless to say downcast eyes of modesty, a touch of submissiveness (at the return to the home tonality of F major at ‘Je suis toute dans mes yeux’, for example), add to the erotic impulse. The composer has created a song that is breathless with innocence and sexual experience at the same time.

This is a big song, and bristling with extraordinary elan, at least in the opening section which suggests a fanfare for the arrival of the deputation of sisters, the kind of poetic symbol that is also beloved of Van Lerberghe’s compatriot Maeterlinck. The arrival of spring is associated with the awakening of love, and there is a priapic note in the energy of this music, an upbeat tempo which is not heard again until the seventh song in the cycle. Right-hand semiquavers ripple in Fauré’s implacably fast metronome marking while the left hand, at first engaged in canonic imitation with the vocal line, drives the music forward. In this register of the piano we might imagine a horn combining with glistening harp sonorities. For the poem’s third verse (‘Elles, lentes, en longues robes’) Fauré provides music that is extraordinarily apt for the image of spirits crossing the ‘blurred threshold’ of night and dawn. This accompaniment of gently oscillating quavers glides forward like an army of willowy female ghosts – one can almost hear the rustling of invisible silk gowns as one harmony melts imperceptibly into the next. Playing this passage for the first time is a revelation for any pianist – a nightmare of accidentals certainly, but also an induction into the Fauréan mysteries.

This is one of Fauré’s most touching creations; Nectoux finds its ‘utterly human tenderness’ unique in the composer’s songs. The poet’s metaphor here becomes the musical raison d’être. The image of a bird, a tiny and vulnerable creature, pinpointed as a dot on a seascape, is at the heart of Fauré’s musical illustration of ‘le rythme éternel / Des flots et de l’espace’. Thus in the middle of a cycle purportedly about a walled garden we have music which suggests the gentle rocking of the sea seen at a distance, and the breadth of a marine landscape (so much for attempting any definitive subject categorization of the songs of a composer as complex as this). This drifting and bobbing is caught to perfection by the seemingly simple device of a syncopated bass, the displacement of a quaver across the bar line which also makes the imploring lover seem to tug gently at the sleeve of the person to whom this hymn of devotion is addressed. In the half-barcarolle, half-berceuse of this wonderful music, the harmonies are as ever-changing as the sea seen in different glinting lights. There is a sublime visit to the key of G flat major (in second inversion) for the setting of the poem’s second strophe, a moment of calm on the water, a halcyon day. Even more wonderful, and ever more protected from the storms, is the way the music briefly slips into C major at Fauré’s repeat of the first two lines before making its gliding return into the home key of E flat.

This great and powerful nocturne lies at the heart of this cycle, just as the enchanted grotto is the most secret of places within the walled garden. It is impossible to say who this spirit is, which nymph, who lies asleep here, a metaphor perhaps for the loved one who is yet to be discovered like some sleeping princess, and whose awakening will signal a burst of radiance. No one in all the history of song wrote accompanied hymns of this kind like Fauré. This is one of the last in a great line of his songs that are accompanied by a slow and magnificent sequence of chords mainly in stately crotchets. This processional is perhaps the most magnificent of its type; the musical argument is carried from beginning to end in a grande courbe of music that defies mortal logic while being supremely logical in Fauré’s hands. It is amazing how static this music seems on paper and how, in performance, it seems to grow from one harmonic change to the next, like the gradual opening, leaf by leaf, of a gorgeously coloured exotic flower. We are reminded of a similar masterpiece, Le parfum impérissable. The dedicatee of this song, Claire Croiza, had recently created the role of Pénélope in Fauré’s opera; that this great mélodie singer was rewarded with the gift of Dans la nymphée is an indication of Fauré’s own estimation of its worth.

In the genre of the spinning song (Schubert’s Gretchen, Schumann’s Spinnelied duet, Wagner’s chorus in Der fliegende Holländer, Chabrier’s Gwendoline) this is the slowest and most unusual. Yet it is extraordinary how believably the accompaniment evokes the act of spinning at the wheel in a more realistic way than the whirring centrifuge of other evocations. The threads of the accompaniment weave together, warp and woof in right hand and left. It may be that the composer was thinking more of the use of the spinning wheel’s foot-pedal in each of these paired phrases of right-hand quavers than of a depiction of a rotating wheel. In the half-light, in the shade on a beautiful April day, the task is accomplished slowly and carefully, en sourdine. This is another portrait of the imagined lover, the ‘chère enfant’; she is earnest rather than voluptuous, ‘toute occupée’ and concentrating deeply. Sexual allure is still part of the picture: the sensuous cut of her flowing ‘robe à queue’ is part of the strange, gestural music in wafting crotchets that is the song’s middle section. As always in this music the harmonic progressions defy analysis; this synthesis of complexity and transparent simplicity is particularly apparent in this shy but moving song. Fauré omits the second strophe in Van Lerberghe’s poem. Nectoux avers that the reason for this was that the large number of sibilants in this passage (too explosive in vocal effect) offended the ever-practical composer.

There are only two fast songs in this cycle, and this is the second of them. The blindfolded lover describes the strange sensations of walking into unknown territory – on water, into waves of fire. It is no surprise then that in this music (where one reaches the key of F major in root position only in the song’s final five bars) one feels the ground disappearing beneath one’s feet. There is pleasure and excitement in this surrendering of control (surely a sexual metaphor), but danger too in this song of precarious impetuosity. This is music that is vertiginous to play; the pianist’s right hand must move between these oscillating chords (each one a glinting beam of harmonic light) with exquisite precision. As in Je me poserai sur ton cœur the music is constructed, broadly speaking, on a dominant pedal; as a result the music stands on tiptoe, always hoping to be allowed to go home. Jankélévitch talks of the ‘azure’ of F major and it is true that this resembles music of the great outdoors, very different from the perfumed enclosures of Dans la nymphée for example.

La chanson d’Ève ends in a song of death, Ô mort, poussière d’étoiles – a majestic, even frightening, work of great darkness and power. The death described in Inscription sur le sable is of an entirely different order. Mention of jewellery and pale sand prompts thoughts that these words may describe an Egyptian queen or princess from thousands of years ago, her body mummified and turned to dust. Reading these words always reminds me of Fleurs, the poem by Louise de Vilmorin about the burning of love letters that Poulenc set in his cycle Fiançailles pour rire (with phrases like ‘sable de tes baisers’ and ‘les beaux yeux sont de cendre’). It is extraordinary that in two composers so unlike each other (Poulenc claimed to dislike Fauré, yet played him divinely) the musical solutions share a similar mournful gravity, the music drained of melodrama and undue emphasis. There is ceremony and hierarchy in this music, but all sense of personal tragedy has been erased by the passing of time; it is true that the closing bars, a particularly arid passage in E minor in the bass clef, have a finality that brooks no appeal.